Higher Level Art…you hear chatter about this artist collaborative echo through social media, you see their work all over the city, you’ve read about them. Higher Level Art founders Danny Babcock and Matthew Dayler are busy guys, and they work really hard. They seem to have infinite amounts of creative energy, coupled with good business sense, which is a pretty rare combination. Their projects have included the 2008, 2009 and 2010 Fringe Festival murals.
Semantics opened Namaz Khaneh (house of prayer in Farsi) on Saturday, January 8; the first solo show by promising young Cincinnati artist Sheida Soleimani. The permanently semi-finished gallery space at Semantics serves as a good venue for this work which consists of a series of images showing the artist's own roughly completed small-scale constructions. The greenish yellow tone of the walls of these small tableaux almost...
On January 7, Aaron Cowan wrapped up a respectable exhibition of new paintings at Aisle Gallery. The works on display –some exquisite, some ordinary- were predicated on an elaborate mapping mechanism developed by Cowan. Daily activity was collated, categorized, and compressed into a system of color codes deployed across the surface of his supports in amounts corresponding to said activity; or so I’m told. Artists have a funny...
Ivan Fortushniak returns to Manifest Gallery this month with a solo exhibition of 15 modest sized works that range from the prosaic to the superb. A god in his own way, Fortushniak fashions painted worlds that resonate with ambiguity and unease. In his universe figures from the past stare obliquely into contemporary landscapes, are compelled skyward by invisible forces, and take part in tense, sometimes dangerous,...
Francisco José de Goya was 53 years old, seriously deaf but acutely visual, when he published the extraordinary series of eighty images called Los Caprichos now on view at the Taft Museum of Art. Caprichos—the word means “whims” or “fancies”—in this artist’s hands become the thoughtless, often cruel, frequently selfish extravagances of a society in which the verities are up for question and political and economic...
Place is the ostensible subject of Rosson Crow painted dreamscapes, and out of the seven canvases in her exhibition, Myth of the American Motorcycle, at the Contemporary Arts Center, only two are outdoor scenes. In all, the artist depiction of space is loose and layered, barely hinting at architectural detail or expansive depth of sky to provide the viewer with visceral position. This obfuscation of place is a result of Crow...
Diana Duncan Holmes presents a body of photo-based work in her solo exhibition Movement, Chance, Light at the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery opening on December 17 and continuing through February 27 th , 2011. Holmes’ work falls squarely within the contemporary mode of art-making in which traditional media are used in innovative ways.
The Greenwich House Gallery’s current show, DUO, features new work by two prominent Cincinnati artists—Tom Towhey and Greg Storer.
Tom Towhey’s paintings have been described as surreal fantasies—fairy tales conjuring thoughts of Alice in Wonderland. Towhey often fills his canvases edge to edge with layers of detail. It is this layering, or the creation of “subtexts” as he has said, that m...
Who does not have a collection? From Imelda Marcos (shoes) to Wayne Gretzky (coins), the urge to amass prized objects is widespread. When we fall in love with the tactile or the purely sensory, the things or events that talk back to us of their history, their beauty, their thrill, or their odd place in the flow of human evolution, then we want more, and more, and more, and the hunt is on.
